The moment of relative equipoise is a special one—and rare. The sudden removal of access barriers to creative production and dissemination has created an explosion of “user generated content,” but it has not lead to attention equality. Traffic on the web tends to follow power laws. A small number of blogs, websites and videos get outsized attention.

It’s probably true that receiving attention correlates with giving it. People who write interesting blogs tend to read a lot of blogs too. But giving attention can never scale as fast as receiving it. If the laughing baby spent the rest of his life watching YouTube videos all day long, he will never see as many as saw his.

And some people don’t even try. The folks at Universal Music Group have watched only 3,927 videos. Assuming they use the account to upload and test their own videos, they didn’t even bother to watch 700 of their own videos once. And, at the extreme of this and many things, we have Britney Spears. She, or her “people”—have watched only 25 YouTube videos, but they forced the rest of us to watch her efforts 188 million times. That’s 5,700 years of progressively more fetishized hip-thrusting!**